


Palimpsest

by DivineSuperfluousness



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-24
Updated: 2012-03-24
Packaged: 2017-11-02 10:53:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/368203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DivineSuperfluousness/pseuds/DivineSuperfluousness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coda to 7x17, The Born-Again Identity</p>
            </blockquote>





	Palimpsest

Meg comes and hides the bodies, when she has to. She cauterizes the wounds that have bled light into Castiel's shadowed room. He screams, first because of the brightness, and then again because it is gone. The orderly on the ground lies lifeless, scorched through and through by the fire of grace. Piles of incandescent feathers cover the room, and these Meg complains vocally about having to sweep up later. But as she leaves, dragging the unfortunate young man by the neck as she goes, she gives Cas that smile, coy as a schoolgirl, and on the occasions that he manages to see it he wants to physically recoil. He's been stripped raw in the places that define him, and even the most unnoticeable and worldly things have become harsh and jagged. The buzz of the lights, a din that doesn't even dim at night, because the electricity is still there, still right there. Last week Lucifer had him take apart the bedsprings from his mattress and stick them in the power outlet.

Castiel does try very hard to think about the good things. The Winchesters were a lot of the good things. They were a lot of the bad things, too. So many. Lucifer had picked up the flavor of living with Sam, so he came full to the brim with devastating details about the time during which he'd been calling himself Emmanuel. The brothers' fight to stop Leviathan. Bobby's death. The way Dean's hands shake when it's been a few hours since he's had a drink and the way Sam had for months swallowed down hard on every scream that Lucifer tried to ground out of him. And then when he's drowning in how he's failed them, his brother turns it on its head, jeering, calling out to his pride and to all the reasons he'd assumed the mantle of God for in the first place, and he had been  _so right_. But not even Lucifer can manage to persuade him that he was righteous.

Before this, had he ever been afraid? He doesn't think so. He always had so much purpose, full of purpose. It was what he was, a being of  _intent_. Here there is no purpose. No truth, no way, no light. There is the blueprint of an unfathomable creature of endless malice, laid over with the guilt of the soul that built it, with an angel's faculties at its disposal. No truth.

Sam, lucky, human Sam, who will never have to know how real this is, can't imagine it in the scope of his world, that something his mind made could be real, real as anything else.

They're beings of intent.

"And we can burn like this for thousands of years, little Castiel. Long after the sun has died, you and I will still burn."

Hell, an existence of torment for sinners, presided over by that first that did sin. Lucifer lets out a callous laugh.

They burn cold.


End file.
